R&R
by Shyaway
Summary: Jack, Anamaria, a bottle of rum, and a quiet afternoon aboard the Pearl.


They're lying on the sun-warmed deck of the Pearl, Jack and Anamaria and a bottle of rum, he propped against the bulkhead, she stretched out mermaid-like on the boards, the rum passed from hand to hand between them. Jack's chest is bare, Anamaria's isn't, yet; he is trying, every so often a brown bejewelled hand flutters to her waist to tug her garment free of her britches, or slides, burningly, along her breastbone and under her collar, but each time she swats him away. It's not that she doesn't want him; at the touch of those rope-roughened fingers on the swell of her breasts she's remembering heady Caribbean nights passed, memories she wants to play out again. It's just that this is how they play their game. He's got to try twice more before she accedes, then it will be he who is coy.

He's glittering like the sunlight on the undulating waves that are making the ship bob gently; golden smile, silver ring, black diamond eyes that snap and sparkle. Her shine is quieter, steadier, like the glow of the Pearl herself. Jack thinks her raven hair and dark skin are like his, akin to the black timbers and sails of their ship, though the woman is the least scarred of the three of them. True enough she has her share, there's a healed gash on the shapely right hand she's holding out for the bottle that reaches halfway to her elbow, but Pearl bears innumerable marks that no sandpaper or polish can remove, and he...

Anamaria eyes him covertly as she drinks, taking in the way his bronzed skin shines in the sunlight and how its intricate patterns of tattoos and scars ripple and stretch when he moves. Some of them she knows as her own - a skull she inked with her own hand, an injury she had stitched herself, one scar that she had actually inflicted when, provoked by him beyond endurance, she'd smashed a glass on the wall behind him and a shard had lacerated his arm. Others are mysterious to her, like the whipmarks he's displaying by leaning forward to rub at something on the Pearl's deck. Old wounds, she knows, but not their origins. Trace those thin lines with a curious finger and he'll flinch as if the cuts were still fresh, so she leaves them be, though she is so achingly tempted by his tanned and finely-muscled back.

Jack, sensing he is being admired, looks back at her over his shoulder and gives her his best grin. She responds, gratifyingly, with a knowing quirk of the mouth and a languorous stretch that brings those perfectly-turned ankles - he's always been so taken with them - closer to him. Catching her tattooed right foot in one hand, he strokes the sensitive hollow by her ankle bone with his thumb, then with his dark gaze meeting hers, presses his lips to the inside of her ankle.

His moustache tickles. She snatches her foot away, laughing, relaxed, warmer now than sun or rum can account for.

He lies down beside her, both on their sides, facing each other. Fleetingly he closes his eyes as he rests his cheek against the deck, then just as her breath quickens at the delicious proximity of him, his eyes pop open, the gold and white smile flashes again and he starts to tell her a ridiculous story about a fisherwoman who caught a merman.

It's absurd and, she soon finds out, bawdy, as she listens to that deep voice redolent of rum and adventure and sex telling her what this merman can do with his tail. At first Jack's dirty brown hands explore her face as he talks, then play with her hair, unfastening her braid and caressing the loose locks down to her breast. He cups it and teases the hardening nipple through the thin fabric of her shirt. He gets his knuckles rapped for that, but she's laughing and so is he.

Still laughing, she leans over to kiss him, and run her own fingers through his beaded, scratchy hair and over the smooth hot skin of his chest. He pulls away and rolls over onto his back, looking at her sidelong through womanishly long eyelashes, feigning bashfulness. She sits up on her knees to make her advance and - modesty not being his strong suit - Jack grins again and reaches for her.

Voices reach them from the beach below, finally banishing indolence in their scramble to have his cabin door locked before the provisioning party returns. 


End file.
